Western Digital My Book World Edition

If you want to back up to an external drive wirelessly -- or you want to access your drive's contents when you're away from home, over the Internet -- you'll need a network-attached storage (NAS) drive. That might sound complicated, but experts say the Western Digital My Book World Edition makes it easy. You plug it into your Internet router, and the Western Digital icon will pop up on your computer screen (as long as you're running recent versions of the Windows or Mac operating systems, testers say). You can drag files onto the external drive, or you can use the included backup software for Windows or the Mac OS to set up automatic backups. You can also play multimedia files on the World Edition on your HDTV through a Microsoft Xbox 360 or Sony Playstation 3.

If you're away from home, you can access the files on the World Edition over the Internet, but one expert says the process is painfully slow and only for emergencies. NAS drives work more slowly than regular external hard drives overall, because you're sending data over an Ethernet connection rather than the faster USB 2.0, FireWire or eSATA. For faster performance, experts recommend the LaCie d2 Quadra (*Est. $125 for 500 GB) desktop drive, which offers all of those faster connections but is not network capable. The World Edition has a USB port, but that's only for adding another external hard drive -- not for getting files onto or off of the World Edition. The World Edition comes in 1 TB (*Est. $170) and 2 TB (*Est. $270) versions. The Western Digital World Edition II includes two hard disks in one enclosure, in 2 TB (*Est. $280) and 4 TB (*Est. $550) sizes. All versions carry a three-year warranty.

RegisterHardware conducts the most complete test of the Western Digital My Book World Edition, comparing it with rival NAS drives. Tests at The Wall Street Journal and ConsumerReports.org are less extensive but still expert and very helpful. User reviews at Amazon.com are useful, but it can be hard to tell whether an owner is reviewing the most recent version of this drive.